Wayne Beaton's blog

Update: Note that as of October 11/2017, Java 9 is 100% supported “out of the box” by Eclipse IDE, Oxygen Edition; Java 9 can be used to run your Eclipse IDE, Oxygen Edition, and can be used to build Java 9 applications without additional configuration. Download or update today.

I’m particularly interested in learning more about Language Server Protocol at the combined Eclipse Converge and Devoxx US conferences at the end of March. We have a handful of projects doing work on the topic, and the opportunity to connect directly with the developers doing the work is too good of an opportunity to miss.

All third party content must be taken through the Eclipse Foundation’s Intellectual Property (IP) Due Diligence Process before being used by an open source project hosted by the Eclipse Foundation. This includes all third party content that is incorporated into project code, included in builds, or otherwise required by the project code to provide functionality.

Intellectual Property Policy Changes Implementation

The Eclipse Foundation’s Intellectual Property (IP) Policy was recently updated and we’re in the process of updating our processes and support infrastructure to accommodate the changes. With the updated IP Policy, we introduced the notion of Type A (license certified) and Type B (license certified, provenance checked, and scanned) due diligence types for third-party dependencies that projects can opt to adopt.

Long-time Eclipse Committer, Ian Bull initiated a interesting short chat on Twitter yesterday about one big challenge when it comes to intellectual property (IP) management. Ian asked about the implications of somebody forking an open source project, changing the license in that fork, and then distributing the work under that new license.

With the changes in the Eclipse Intellectual Property (IP) Policy made in 2016, the Eclipse Foundation now offers two types of IP Due Diligence for the third-party software used by a project. Our Type A Due Diligence involves a license certification only and our Type B Due Diligence provides our traditional license certification, provenance check, and code scan for various sorts of anomalies.

One of my favourite literary quotes comes from Canadian author, Hugh MacLennan.

“But that night as I drove back to Montreal, I at least discovered this: that there is no simple explanation for anything important any of us do, and that the human tragedy, or the human irony, consists in the necessity of living with the consequences of actions performed under the pressure of compulsions so obscure we do not and cannot understand them.”
― Hugh MacLennan, The Watch that Ends the Night

The source for the Eclipse Project Handbook is in AsciiDoc format (rendered using Asciidoctor via Maven), and includes embedded Graphviz graph descriptions (which are rendered into embedded images). Proofing those images is a bit of a pain: it requires that I actually build the handbook and use a browser to view the results.

Bugzilla has served the Eclipse Community well for many years, easily scaling to serve the needs of over 500 open source projects, servicing a community of thousands of software developers generating half of a million issue reports over close to two decades (I’m taking some liberties with that last one: it’s been about 17 years). When I say “easily”, I mean that our world-class IT team has made it look easy.